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7 Responses

As they are already getting a company.com domain and will retain the company.co.uk page the only reason for the CLIENT-NAME.co.uk page is as a personal landing page / portfolio page.

It is worth seeing if I can rank their name in the USA. The domain is set up to rank for this already and is already ranking close to page one.

I have seen other name based domains rank in both countries. I think it is worth the risk as I doubt my clients UK rankings (for their name) will be altered. They have scores of links and the content is well targeted.

Ranking for a person's name in the US with a 'name.co.uk' is possible - for example I think if you do a search for 'Jane Copland' in the US you'll see janecopland.co.uk ranking 1st.

Do you know how well or otherwise the site is ranking in the US right now?

Essentially the ability to rank will likely be impacted by how common or otherwise the person's name is and how strong their site is.

In terms of actions from you I wouldn't be inclined to change hosting as that's unlikely to have an impact on it's own - however if as you say you're looking to change the hosting in any case then moving it the US probably wouldn't hurt. I'd also encourage you to build links to this domain to strengthen the site.

I guess I'm saying it's not necessarily impossible, but in an ideal world you'd get some sort of generic domain (.com / .net etc).

My experience is that the .uk extension is a strong indicator for a local site and it creates extra work. US hosting, contact details and predominantly US links would help, however personally I would still be thinking about a separate non .uk name.

As I read through your question my first impression was... No Waaaaay!

I wouldn't advice to mix things up. Just simple create a new brand for the US market. The reasons are the following:

1. When re-targeting an established website you can hurt your rankings in both UK and US results.

2. a .co.uk is a ccTLD which wont be very useful for a US targeting

3. for a better on-site optimization you will have to rewrite content to better fit the US English readers level (and there are major differences between US and UK English) - What happens to their established visitors?

4. if you reach to retarget somehow the .co.uk website, they will see a fall in the sales (because they will probably loose some ranks in the .co.uk and gain some new ones in the .com)

Ok. Now if you buy a new brand name for the US market:

1. You can develop from first stage an optimized website (information architecture, content, links, etc.)

2. You can have a brand name that is more catchy for US market.

3. They can run two different websites in the same time effectively. Until the US website comes up, they will have enough sales from UK markets.

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